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Don Mattingly has been around the new, stripped-down Miami Marlins long enough the last few weeks to know who they are. Now he’s trying to figure out what they are.

That’s why every exhibition this spring is more of an exploration. Take Odrisamer Despaigne’s start Wednesday in a 3-1 win over the Washington Nationals at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium. Three perfect innings with four strikeouts mixed in.

That might nudge the quirky right-hander and his hesitation windup closer to a solid spot in the Marlins’ rotation or in the bullpen, or it might just be a fresh set of notes scribbled in the margins of a Miami training-camp roster that features 28 players who were not in the organization at the end of last season.

“I go out there with the expectation of putting 200 quality innings together,” said Despaigne, projecting a total that no Miami pitcher has reached in a season since Mark Buehrle in 2012. “In Cuba, I threw 220 one time so it’s not the first time for me. I’m ready for it.”

In Cuba, Despaigne pitched for the national team, and it was during a trip to a 2013 international tournament in the Netherlands that he defected. He lived in Spain after that and pitched in Mexico and through a special tryout with major league scouts finally got his U.S. pro career started, much later than most.

By opening day, if Despaigne is on the Marlins’ 25-man roster as expected, he’ll be a week shy of his 31st birthday, one of the oldest men in the clubhouse.

“Pitching in this community, if it was up to me, I would be pitching in Miami my whole life,” Despaigne said.

Everybody is fighting for some kind of a foothold here, it seems, a place in the South Florida family and in the even closer community of major-league regulars.

This is how it goes when a team reshuffles the entire deck with offseason trades of Giancarlo Stanton and every other name that used to make you sit up and notice. An intimate gathering of 1,987 fans for a weekday spring-training game, that’s part of the deal for the Marlins, too, but the games are played out by anxious men who aren’t looking to get it over with and fit nine holes of golf in before sundown.

There is urgent work being done in Jupiter by players who are tired of toggling back and forth between the minors and the bigs in the minds of managers and personnel pros.

Magneuris Sierra, Miami’s leadoff batter on Wednesday, fits that category. He made his major-league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals last May and immediately kicked off his career with a nine-game hitting streak. That was a rookie record for a franchise that has featured the earliest efforts of naturals such as Stan Musial and Rogers Hornsby and Albert Pujols and Enos Slaughter, but even now there is no guarantee of a spot for him in Miami’s starting outfield.

“You see it differently with different guys,” Mattingly said when asked about any nervousness he is seeing from players who may be treading water for the first time in a major-league training camp. “Some guys are maybe more tentative when you see them for the first time in camp. Other guys are pretty aggressive. They’re not backing off from anything. It’s just the way they play.”

Put yourself in the shoes of non-roster invitee Isaac Galloway. He played at Roger Dean with the Jupiter Hammerheads in 2010. And in 2012. And in 2013.

It didn’t take long, therefore, for Galloway to take off for his second stolen base of the spring Wednesday once he reached base on a walk. He’s 28 years old and he’s wearing No. 79. Why wait?

“They’re on their own to go,” Mattingly said. “They’ve got to get on first, No. 1, but nobody has been stopped. We want to see if they know when to run, and who’s aggressive out there. Good base stealers are usually guys that are not afraid to get thrown out. They’re gonna go. It’s just part of us getting to know our guys and seeing what they can do.”

What they’ve done so far in the tiniest sliver of spring games is win, four times out of six tries, to be exact, with a tie thrown in.

Wei-Yin Chen, the Marlins’ highest-paid player who has been recovering from a torn ligament in his left elbow, is still working slowly through a pitching program. Nobody knows when we’ll see him on the mound again, so that’s bad.

It will take patience to sort this all out, and then it will take time to make it work.

What exactly are the Miami Marlins? So far there are only blueprints to go by, and even a lifer like Donnie Baseball must squint to read them.